occasionally bombarding the headquarters in an irregular manner

April 28, 2010

A leaflet from the Kippers comes through the door, containing the following:

Labour, especially Harriet Harman, intend to allow employers to discriminate in favour of ethnic minorities and women. UKIP say that employment should be on merit alone. We will not be reduced to second class citizens in our own country.

So who are “we” exactly? And is there a specifically anti-Harriet Harman vote out there?

Also, if you vote UKIP you not only take Britain out of the EU, but get to keep the Turks out as well somehow. Excellent value.

The Chinese experience never seems to get any exposure in debates about comparative forms of healthcare, perhaps because both apologists for and critics of the PRC still conceive of it as in some way socialist. So stuff like this stays off the radar.

Liu Bohu's mood was like yesterday's weather, relentlessly gloomy.

Yesterday Liu's son was one hundred days old, but because of 39,229.75 RMB in outstanding fees, his son had become a "hostage" at the city's Maternal & Child Healthcare Hospital.

Yang Yong, head of pediatrics at the hospital, told this reporter yesterday afternoon that Liu had only paid 1,200 RMB prior to the hospital stay but had made not a cent in additional payments, so he showed no good faith whatsoever.

I've been seeing reports of creditors taking debt hostages for years, and they are always similar in key points: the creditor keeps a human being in forcible detention and demands payment of a debt as a condition for release. What's more, the hostage-taking and the identity of the kidnapper are not secret; that would defeat the whole purpose. And finally, the police do nothing. They think of it as a civil dispute having nothing to do with them. For example, back in 1992 I read of a case where a jilted suitor took a woman's baby as hostage for the return of over 1,000 yuan in gifts. The police didn't immediately arrest this known kidnapper; instead, the go-between, the village committee, and "judicial departments" tried for five months to persuade him to return the child. Only then did they finally give up and arrest him.

Actually, I was wrong to say the police do nothing - sometimes they actively assist in taking debt hostages. In a book entitled One Hundred Strategies for Using Law to Clear Up Debts (运用法律手段清债百策), the writer mentions as an aside that a plaintiff trying to collect a debt asked the police and the procuracy to assist. They helpfully detained three people from the defendant organization for up to eight months, but were unsuccessful in collecting.

It would be accurate to describe this situation as "Dickensian" since very much the same thing happened to Dickens' father. It's the kind of thing I was referring to when I described China as a Hayekian dictatorship.

Taiwan:
...and Ukraine:
I note that the Ukranians still seem to have the old Russian knack for artillery: also that one prerequisite for election there seems to be a really thick neck. In general, I find the Taiwanese “nerds gone wild” approach to parliamentary combat more appealing. Sadly, there’s no translation available but the clip does indicate which of the combatants belong to the KMT (blue writing) and DPP (green). Anyway, enjoy.

After his departure from the Lib Dems, he considered joining the Tories before choosing Labour. He added: "Even though I've been a Liberal Democrat and discussed joining the Conservatives, I believe I'm a Labour man through and through."

The Tories decided to formalize and promote their selection problem as the A list. Labour seem to be awaiting random explosions, or whatever the Tory oppo researches can disclose. I’m surprised that Labour can’t find some dim or gallant local loyalist to fly the flag in a hopeless seat, or some prehensile rosette monkey planning to get noticed. But these days Tristram Hunt gets to go directly to Stoke, without stopping at Cambridgeshire South East.

Incidentally, I haven’t heard much of the word Labservative from the Lib Dems since it became a possibility that they would have to find enough differences between the two major factions of the oligopoly to justify doing a deal with one of them. Via.

April 27, 2010

As the story progresses, especially in Freedom, the Darknet becomes the nucleus of a human social organization, its overall makeup shifting as the initial thousands of sociopaths and misfits recruited are followed by the millions of normal people attracted by an idealistic vision of a better life. And that human social organization, as per Sobol’s plan, supercedes the Daemon in importance and begins to exist for its own purposes. The new human society organized through the Darknet, we learn, was Sobol’s objective all along: to create a resilient, networked successor society that would continue after global corporate capitalism collapsed from all of its assorted pathologies. The Daemon, and all the spectacular combat capabilities associated with it, was just a midwife; or as one character puts it, “Sobol was willing to be our villain to force necessary change.” Sobol’s avatar argues, at one point in the story, that absent a takeover by the Daemon the inevitable collapse of global capitalism would have led to the death of billions.

And at last, a real Green Defence policy:

As the networked production facilities continue to expand, economies built around meeting real human needs—instead of building cool fighting vehicles—become the primary focus.

Plus some meaty commentary by Kevin Carson. Via John Robb, not surprisingly.

This is one place where I have to admit that Clegg doesn’t make much sense by Clegg’s own standards. On the one hand, he is opposed to “default Atlanticism” and calls for what he calls the “repatriation” of foreign policy, but he would effectively want to make Britain more dependent on America’s nuclear arsenal in order to have more funding for conventional forces so that they could better assist the U.S. in wars in which Clegg believes Britain should not be involved.

In practice I’m not sure Clegg would actually go that far in his reasoning, reasonable though it is. But a wider point is that all the spending commitments at this election seem to be made on promises of money cut elsewhere, via “efficiency savings” or tax crackdowns or switching budgets between projects and other variations on the theme of “we’ll pay for it with money we find down the back of the settee”.
Yet this makes these commitments especially vulnerable, because nothing is easier than saying “whoops, there wasn’t any money down the back of the settee after all. Sorry folks, you know how it is.”

What all the candidates are doing here is getting their betrayals out in the open. Personally, I’d be far more worried if I was ring fenced or promised resources than if I was part of some anonymous toiling mass funded by the general government budget. The key to survival here is not to be identified at all.

A surgeon who cut off a patient's testicle by mistake has been struck off the medical register.
Dr Sulieman Al Hourani was only supposed to take out a cyst but removed the whole right testicle instead.

The blunder happened at Fairfield General Hospital in Bury, Greater Manchester, in September 2007.

As in, if I’d lived the other side of the Manchester/Bury border – a 15 minute walk away - when I needed that particular operation, that could have been me. As it was, my swollen testicles were cupped in the tender hands of North Manchester General. And check this out:

The hearing was also told that in August 2006, Dr Al Hourani had injected himself with two milligrams (mg) of midazolam, a powerful sedative, which was meant for a patient.
Hospital staff said the doctor, who was on call, appeared unsteady on his feet and was later found in the doctors' mess room "deeply asleep" and taken to A&E.

Dr Al Hourani was issued with a final warning over that incident but was eventually dismissed by his employers, Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, in October 2007 over allegations he stole two boxes of dihydrocodeine tablets.

In truth, and after the debriding, there isn’t a huge amount of visible difference between a full and partial orchidectomy. There is, arguably, a case for getting the whole thing tidied up, proper like. But not by this guy.

He denies attempted murder and causing grievous bodily harm (GBH) with intent, but has admitted a charge of GBH.

Hey, scenes from a Catholic education: familiar ones I might add. I suppose there are people who will put this attempt to impose capital punishment down to the absence of corporal punishment as an option, basically a force equalizer for teachers who can’t cope.
I mean, these kids were obviously trying to force a breakdown, and so they did, but the idea was that the teacher could deploy structured violence as a deterrent.

Not that it ever worked, though teachers in my day did get to lash out with marginally softer objects. On the other hand there was that story about a kid being locked in the closet in the music room overnight, but nothing ever came of that. Maybe he’s there now.

It’s good to see all the works visible in this, but it occurs to me that for the last three elections, whatever myrmidon filled the slot as the Sun’s political editor was undoubtedly a New Labour propagandist. Labour supporters did complain about that then, but there was no question at that stage of the folk at the New Statesman actually disobeying Murdoch.

It’s also good to see that the effect of this seems to be, thus far, pretty feeble. There’s little of the sheer malignant gusto Kelvin Mackenzie brought to Tory propagandizing. Maybe the whole thing is just becoming obsolescent because its done its job. The British market isn’t as vital to Murdoch as it once was, and he can do just as good business with Clegg as he can with anyone else.

Disobeying Murdoch, or rather his maybe overenthusiastic servitors, is certainly as good a motivation to vote as any, but I think it’s gone beyond the stage where it really matters. Still, if you can’t get the man you can have a crack at the minions, if only to make it clear to the boss that the folk he has in charge of one of his fiefdoms are screwing up on the job.

April 25, 2010

Quote of the Day: Dredged from the comments of Flying Rodent’s piece on New Labour’s lingering resentment of public opinion over Iraq:

I’m the person Paul Dacre warns you about. War in Iraq – where we were just one of several junior partners to America – will one day be seen for what it was. A victory of universal rights over the power of the nation state.

Tremble in your boots Burmese generals. You’re next.

Myanmar is having some kind of electoral process this later year; obviously, not an election as such, but a process that re-inforces the coherence of the regime through the participation of pre-selected candidates in a public vote. Rather like the recent elections in Iraq in fact, only with lower levels of violence. If you think that the current state of Iraq justifies the war, then what’s your problem with Myanmar?

And it is Myamnar, just as Zimbabwe isn’t Rhodesia and the USSR wasn’t Russia, despite the fact that both these names were coined by dictatorships. Pretending otherwise is just symptomatic of the levels of fantasy politics inherent in Decentism.